Website & OOliteInfo Release

[maaarcooose]

I am proud to announce that I finally have my website running and as such have uploaded the first version of OOliteInfo, my fiction research tool, but I imagine others may want to use it too.

http://www.theramist.co.uk/

Please download it, try it out and let me know if it works for you. It is windows only (please don't kill me) but I suspect I will do a cross platform version in the future when my ObjC skills are up to scratch (might even just do it on the web page).

Also on my site are some other details of my various writing projects. I will be releasing Mostly Deadly there when it is finally finished.

Any and all feedback please people.

Cheers.

!m!

Marc A.K.A. The Theramist

[Cmdr Wyvern]

My install of WINE is borked ATM. Anyone want to see if this will run in WINE?

[maaarcooose]

If it does, you will certainly need the VB.net 2008 runtimes installed.

I'll give it a go tonight if I get a chance.

!m!

[Svengali]

He - cool. This tool can be a nice helper. Muchas gracias, maaarcooose!

I'd guess the numbers in the lower right corner of the Planet Info box are the cursor coords equivalent to Oolites player.ship.cursorCoordinatesInLY? Maybe you could display the planets position as well and moving the coords to the left would make them fully readable?

And by removing the extension .deploy for OoliteInfo.exe and the datafiles you don't have to install it (may depend on your system) .-)

[maaarcooose]

I'm still getting to grips with the newer version of VB, I started with the original VB years ago so it will improve over time.

Ideally I'd like to hard code all the data instead of using CSV files, but they made it easier and quicker to program.

The Coordinates are just a bit of debuging left behind to be honest. I'm going to update with stuff like that in the near future.

Also I want to try and do the jump routes using the data instead of calculating them.

!m!

[another_commander]

And by removing the extension .deploy for OoliteInfo.exe and the datafiles you don't have to install it (may depend on your system) .-)

I did that too - we think alike, Svengali. It run fine on WinXP SP3.

maaarcooose, this is a neat little program you've got there. My observations after running it are:
- The Show Political Maps checkbox does not seem to do anything when I select it. I guess that is an upcoming feature, but just thought to mention it since I have not installed the app as intended, but used Svengali's trick instead.
- The planet finder box seems to be case sensitive. Zaatxe is found, but zaatxe is not. I think it would be preferrable to make the finder case insensitive for us lazy users not bothering to use Shift.
- I would enjoy a more visible indication of found planets when using the finder box. Brighter color or anything to attract the eye on the found planet a bit more easily.
- Default jump distance is 71 (and the unit of measurement is tenths of a light year, I guess). Is there a reason for it? It is 70 in the game.
- As Svengali said, it would be good having a readout of the actual selected planet coordinates, not only the cursor coordinates. The cursor coordinates readout has to be moved slightly to the left in order to accommodate the longer strings of numbers.
- Sometimes the species descriptions overflow the allocated space. A second row allocation may be a good idea there.
- Opening and then closing the info (About) box does not refresh the window, leaving square gaps until a refresh is triggered.

Once again, good job. I am sure it will be a helpful tool for all players.

[drew]

Fabaroni!!

Downloads...

Cheers,

Drew.

[Thargoid]

Works fine under Win7 home pro too.

One nice thing could be some kind of zoom feature if possible, as with the jump routes displayed having all the systems on the map visible at once can make a bit of a spaghetti mess of tracing individual lines. But that's on my little Acer Aspire, so people with a bigger screen area may have a simpler time.

But could be a most useful little app - well done

[Cody]

Might I suggest moving this useful app/thread to Discussion... it'll get the attention it deserves there.

[maaarcooose]

If you feel it would do better there, then please do move it.

Thanks for all the feedback. I shall address the various issues. The political map is not implemented yet but will be in the future. Other display issues are in process.

!m!

[drew]

Works fine on Win7 Pro 64 Bit.

Feature requests.

Filters! By species, by tech level, by government etc.
Distance (by jump) between two points

Nice work though - could be a really useful tool.

Cheers,

Drew.

[another_commander]

Topic moved to Discussion.

[maaarcooose]

Just to answer a few questions.

- The Show Political Maps checkbox does not seem to do anything when I select it. I guess that is an upcoming feature, but just thought to mention it since I have not installed the app as intended, but used Svengali's trick instead.

Indeed it is an uncoming feature.

- The planet finder box seems to be case sensitive. Zaatxe is found, but zaatxe is not. I think it would be preferrable to make the finder case insensitive for us lazy users not bothering to use Shift.

Will fix this soon.

- I would enjoy a more visible indication of found planets when using the finder box. Brighter color or anything to attract the eye on the found planet a bit more easily.

I'm going to enhance this at some point. Currentlly I use a single picture box to display everything, so putting anything too big in would make the rest of the display get a little messed up. I'm going to redo the main display soon to use multiple layers and only update planets on one, jumproutes on another, indications on another, political/area maps on another. etc.

- Default jump distance is 71 (and the unit of measurement is tenths of a light year, I guess). Is there a reason for it? It is 70 in the game.

Now I had some trouble with this. I calculate the available jump routes based on how close the other planets are, not by the data supplied in the data files. What happens here is that due to the requirement to double the x coordinate, some jump routes do not get plotted. If you look over it closely, you will find that setting it to 70 will mean that 2 jump routes don't get plotted. Setting to 71 means those routes are plotted, but it also adds an extra one that shouldn't be there.
A slightly more detailed reasoning can be found on this thread https://bb.oolite.space/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10825

- As Svengali said, it would be good having a readout of the actual selected planet coordinates, not only the cursor coordinates. The cursor coordinates readout has to be moved slightly to the left in order to accommodate the longer strings of numbers.

Will work on this for the next release.

- Sometimes the species descriptions overflow the allocated space. A second row allocation may be a good idea there.

Will fix on next release. Thinking about rearranging the window, but not sure what would suit best. From what people have said about using a netbook, the screen res is not to great on them so I tried to keep the vertical res under 600, but for my own sanity on the first pass, the width is in the 1200's, but probably not idea for most users. I'd like to try and get it in 1024x600, but hey....

- Opening and then closing the info (About) box does not refresh the window, leaving square gaps until a refresh is triggered.

About box is no way working properly at the moment, but I'll look at it for the next release.

One nice thing could be some kind of zoom feature if possible, as with the jump routes displayed having all the systems on the map visible at once can make a bit of a spaghetti mess of tracing individual lines. But that's on my little Acer Aspire, so people with a bigger screen area may have a simpler time.

A zoom feature is something I really want to add to this. It feels like an essential for the app and thus would mean no dependency on the wimdow size.


I have been trying to have a play with the XNA studio so I can implement it all using DirectX or OpenGL but that's a long way off.
I think a simple zoom and pan function is doable fairly easily (famous last words).

As for the mess of jump points, I would like to be able to do something like, have an option to only display jumps from the selected planet and click to plot routes along with Drew's other suggestion of distance calculations between two planets.

Filters! By species, by tech level, by government etc.

Totally going to do this. Added to feature request list.


Thanks for all the feedback.

Given me quite a bit to get on with.

In the future I am also planning to try and have a little section on ship specs. I kind of envisage a full info app, with tabs for planets, ships, weaponry.


Next release coming soon, and a proper version number on it too.

!m!

[Smivs]

This looks really useful, and as a Linux user I hope you will make this cross-platform. Go for openGL, as DirectX is a windows-only thing.

[maaarcooose]

I'm currently considering options with regards to a reprogram for cross platform possibilities.
At the moment my best candidate is python using a nice cross platform toolkit.

Any good recommendations of a cross platform GUI toolkit for python?

!m!